Quotes About Power

I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power (1 Corinthians 2:1-5).

It is tempting to think that in order to change our experience of our world we need to force others to change. Such thinking is an abdication of our power to change ourselves.

De mens bepaalde door eigen doen en laten of zijn ziel gered dan wel verdoend werd. Waarmee God, in al Zijn alwetendheid en almacht, in feite in Zijn hemd kwam te staan.

People will say with a straight face that having one choice for dear leader is tyranny – but having two is freedom.

in a democracy someone is setting the guidelines for everyone else. Elitist rule is inevitable.

through the centuries men have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees and actions.

f]emales are very interested in colonizing high-value male spaces,

f]emales are very interested in colonizing high-value male spaces," "[m]ale groups are subverted and redirected to fem-centric goals/visions if women are present and not managed with an iron fist."1

the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral.

By regarding all state action as illegitimate, he viewed the two political parties as literal rival gangs whose power needed to be curtailed as much as possible and hopefully destroyed altogether.

American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Whereas the presence of a powerful state suppresses the capability of fighting, the benefits of trade suppress the intention to fight. Countries that trade with one another avoid war not because they fear losing but because they do not find winning an attractive prospect: they gain more economically by not fighting than by prevailing.

Long ago, Margaret Mead, the world-famous anthropologist, noted that we should "never underestimate the power of a small group with dedication to change the world; it is, in fact, the only thing that does.

In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty. —Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Somebody might start to take you serious, and lift your chin with a rifle barrel. Lift it right through the top of your damned head.

For this was the other thing that Elric knew: that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance.

We must be bound to one another then," Elric murmured despairingly. "Bound by hell-forged chains and fate-haunted circumstance. Well, then—let it be thus so—and men will have cause to tremble and flee when they hear the names of Elric of Melinbone and Stormbringer, his sword. We are two of a kind—produced by an age which has deserted us. Let us give this age cause to hate us!

Listen friends, you have to face the truth: You are never going to be rich... The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever.

Once a certain historical momentum is created I don't think it can be stopped.

I passed by General Zia's tomb and knew that I never would have become Muslim if I was raised in this country [Pakistan]. As a rebellious American adolescent, I had chosen Islam because it was the religion of Malcolm X, a language of resistance against unjust power. But in Pakistan, Islam was the unjust power, or at least part of what kept the machine running. Pakistan's Islam was guilty of everything for which I had rebelled against Reagen-Falwaell Christianity of America.

There is a fatal internal contradiction in seeing "democracy" as being nothing more than majority rule, rather than a set of restrictions on majority rule:

Bad feelings have a life of their own.

They had spoken to him of this fear in a thousand conversations over the years, the dread that infected their lives so that every setback, every difficulty— the lost job, the drug-addicted child, the failed marriage— was the result, not of life's uncertainty or human frailty, but of a dark power being wielded against them.

Reaching our soul is the first step on the ladder of finding our higher power.